Better Homes and Garden Weekend

This has been a Better Homes and Garden weekend for us. Fortunately, one of our favorite things to do is work on the house. A couple of weekends ago I was cooking, and even though I had all the spices on my second shelf alphabetized I was having a hard time seeing and finding what I wanted. So George dug into his woodworking catalogs, and found an after market spice rack insert for our spice cabinet. It's a slide out contraption that makes a custom spice rack. This morning he did the install, and it turned out great. He had to do a few modifications since our cabinet wasn't exactly the right size, but of course! He made it work like a charm!

Oh yeah! Now I can see all of the labels and find exactly what I'm looking for! There's some loss of cabinet space, so we have a bonus bin of some items in the pantry, but I love it.

Another project this weekend was continuing to double up our eight raised beds to make four beds that are 20 inches high instead of 10, and to gopher proof them. I did a bunch of prep yesterday that entailed moving the massive mulch pile of the leaves and grass clippings that George had shredded since it was right where the new beds were to go. And I also uprooted the remaining four frames from the old beds on the right hand side of the potager so they were ready to work with today.

The next step for each new bed was to line the bottom with hardware cloth. Gophers move to new territory by burrowing underground, not by cross country travel, so by putting hardware cloth on the bottom of the bed they can't access my potatoes! (They ate up all the lovely tubers as well as the tops of the plants last summer, the dirty rascals.) The taller beds will also be good as I get older so I don't have to bend over as much. Not a problem now, but when I get into my 60s and 70s I'm sure I'll appreciate that. Of course, there's the issue that we'll have to replace the frames before then anyway due to rot and termites, but I'm pretending that won't happen. :D

Ah, and here we are at the end of the day. We totally filled one of the new beds with dirt from the old right hand beds, and filled most of another one. It looks great! So the vision for the future is to make 2 to 3 more double high beds for the right hand side, and someday put in 16 inch pavers in the pathways instead of the free AstroTurf that's there now. I even have visions of having a little picket fence around the whole potager, either a rustic wooden one, or a white one made of materials that never have to be painted. The pavers and fence are not going to happen any time soon. They're just dreams right now.

This last project we've worked on the past two weekends with our neighbors across the street, and it's finally complete. We got two big loads of cheap gravel to line Salt Mine Road, to make our entry way more inviting, and we "planted" these faux shrubs. Yup, they're plastic shrubs. We don't have any way to water any plants out at the entry way, so these are plastic cedars. Hopefully they look real enough that nobody swipes them, and they hold up for a few years. In all, I have to say our entry gate is much more inviting now.